In His Own Words, GGM

The passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez last week has been widely noted and his pathbreaking work in creating the spell of Magic Realism justly praised around the world.  Let his words speak:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."  One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”  One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"My heart has more rooms in it than a whorehouse."  Love in the Time of Cholera

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him."  Love in the Time of Cholera

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"He recognised her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: 'Only God knows how much I loved you.'"  Love in the Time of Cholera

Sci Fi Agonistes III

So, once more into the breach...literally.  As noted a while back, the fledgling Sci Fi publisher and I parted ways earlier this year, so I've been focusing on becoming an "authorpreneur" and going the route of indie publishing for the novelette they had solicited, And on the Eighth Day.  I've shared a lot of info with Keith Krulik about this approach and you can check out his recent post about indie publishing at the Fiction Forge Indy blog here.

As I dug into the topic myself, I was struck initially by the difference between the new "indie" approach and the older, often predatory, self-publishing or vanity press approach.  Yes, the vanity press has its place: for those who want to publish something they simply wish to share with family members or a small group, and who have no interest in reaching a broader audience or ever publishing anything else.  A vanity press is perfect for them and, without it, their dream would never be shared.  Bottom line, the key is that the vanity publisher's customers are not the readers of books but, rather, the writers of them.  Their revenues come mainly from the provision of services to writers, not the sale of books.

Turning Pro: A Long and Winding Road in the War of Art

Wonder of wonders:  at a recent business conference, a young fellow spoke about entrepreneurship and the importance of what he called "turning pro" being "greater than being an amateur."  In a few of our early posts last year, we debated the meaning and relevance of taking a professional approach to our writing, but we didn't dig too deeply into exactly what made one a pro instead of an amateur.  (BTW, I like the word "amateur" as opposed to beginner or neophyte or dilettante ...or worse.)

At any rate, the bright young speaker made several links between being an entrepreneur and the arts, and he recommended a number of books, including one that really caught my attention, Turning Pro, by Steven Pressfield, who also wrote The War of Art.  Pressfield tells the story of his journey to become a published author--a long and winding road in his case--and he recognizes a point at which he moved from being an amateur to approaching his writing as a pro.  He lists his discoveries along the way, and comes up with twenty traits of being a pro, among them:

The pro comes to work every day.  Ideally, that means setting and respecting a time and place for writing each day, but even if we can't always do that, at least the pro is thinking about her work, planning, considering, repeating dialogues or running scenes in her head.  Nothing is more important to becoming a pro than making that level of commitment.  

Photos and Words: The New Ekphrasis

Thank the goddess for Zite, my news aggregator of choice these days.  (Although it does piss me off a touch that we think it's cool to misspell even German words these days.)  Just yesterday, over the last of my morning coffee, scrolling through my aggregated pieces on classical music and bicycling and chess and photography and, primarily, books and writing, I tapped to read "A Thousand Words:  Writing from Photographs," a blog entry by Casey N. Cep in The New Yorker.  

In a fascinating turn toward the digital age, Casey tells us she "...gave up writing hurried descriptions of people on the subway...and scribbling down bits of phrases overheard at restaurants and cafes."  She actually stopped even carrying her notebook.

So, what is she doing now to supply her writing habit?  Easy, her phone/camera, taking shots of everything from urban scenes to unique stones to odd characters to books or paintings she likes or wants to explore further.  "Photography" she says "has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write.  Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."

Wow!

Leverage and Magic

How would you like to have a system for your writing that freed you to concentrate on your brilliant ideas and render them consistently in that magnificent prose you hear in your dreams and in the shower?

How would you like to have a system for your writing where you could easily and consistently and instantly make reference to any and all of your research, including videos and pdf’s and website url’s, and hang any of them, so to speak, right by your manuscript as you work, inspiring you and keeping you on track effortlessly?  (Okay, nothing is really effortless, but hang in there!)

How would you like a system where you could integrate as detailed a planning outline or index card view right into your manuscript and yet see it only when needed?

How would you like a system where you could easily break your manuscript into as many, or as few, pieces as you like—major parts, chapters, or even scenes within chapters—and where you could easily and instantly shift the order of those chapters or scenes, along with their place in your outline, to see how that progression might strengthen your masterpiece?

Unravelling the Yarn

So my stale manuscript (see Knit One, Purl Two…Rip it Apart) has been out of the drawer and warming in the light of day for several weeks now, and I’ve found myself with more energy and enthusiasm for a project than I’ve felt for a good while.  There’s some pretty good writing in this thing, woohoo!  Okay, and I’ve also found a few more darlings and dispatched them heartlessly.

My first real steps in the process were to read the old synopsis and the chapter outline of the novel, making a few notes on areas that seemed to be more sideways motion than forward action.  I then dug into my “manifesto,” a somewhat random compilation of notes and ideas and sketches one of my former grad program mentors, Melissa Pritchard, had encouraged me to write to serve as a holding area of thoughts and debates on the project.  That was well before the days of Scrivener, of course, but that's another post or two.  Over the years, I’ve added to my manifesto by entering new elements, bullet point fashion, at the top of the first page rather than at the end, so my latest ideas and critiques and notes are the first thing I see. 

My goal with the reading of the synopsis and outline was to see how the project fit, structurally, within the guidelines of Larry Brooks’s excellent book Story Engineering, since the majority of the feedback on why the novel didn’t work had to do with a lack of consistent forward direction and increasing overall tension.  It turned out that, in an overall sense, I had my plot points and pinch points in about the right spots, so it seemed I needed to dig deeper to see why the novel still wasn't working.  And, after a few productive sessions of staring off into space and simply trying to BE in the story, I discovered some new, tighter, more dramatic plot elements and characterization that still maintained much of the existing action.  Perfect!

Tilt.

The Significantly Insignificant

A few posts back, I mentioned my reentry into Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, the opening volume of his modernist milestone, In Search of Lost Time.  It had been probably been six or seven years since my last read.  At any rate, I had suggested that, as soon as I finished reading it "in a few weeks," I'd write about setting and description--one of Proust's strengths--and how his writing is a superb example of how great detail can bring fiction to life.  The bad news is that I've not come close to finishing Swann's Way yet.  The good news is also that I've not finished Swann's Way yet, so I'm still savoring Proust's incredible subtlety and penetration in revealing to us not only the details of our surroundings in a way that makes us feel and smell and hear with a freshness that's new, yet comforting in its familiarity, but also in how he peels back the frailest of layers of the depths of what makes us human.  His writing brings the same deep warmth as the tiniest sip, rolled on the tongue, of a wonderful single malt, or a fresh cigar smoked in perfect surroundings, or--name your own sensual delight.

So, as I smile and close the book (figuratively, since it's on the Kindle app on my iPad) and lean back and dream and envy the way Proust has opened the world of ourselves to us, I recall another book I've been savoring these days, James Wood's How Fiction Works.  Wood makes his delightful and enlightening way through the craft elements of fiction and plumbs them with a subtlety and insight beyond most such books I've read.  Starting with POV and his rendering of "free indirect" style, through character, which he boldly notes as the single most difficult task in the craft of fiction, to setting and description (and much more.)  He pegs the deeper use of setting and description--what he terms a "commitment to noticing" or "thisness"--to Flaubert, as most do, and he then goes on to quote the sublime (Chekov and Mann and Bellow) and the flabby (sorry, John Updike in one of his later works!)  And, full circle, back to Proust, Wood says that "Literature makes of us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life."